Episode 103 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet

The bots that try to moderate speech online are doing a terrible job, and the humans in charge of the biggest tech companies aren’t doing any better. The internet’s promise was as a space where everyone could have their say. But today, just a few platforms decide what billions of people see and say online. 

Join EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they talk to Stanford’s Daphne Keller about why the current approach to content moderation is failing, and how a better online conversation is possible. 

More than ever before, societies and governments are requiring a small handful of companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to control the speech that they host online. But that comes with a great cost in both directions -- marginalized communities are too often silenced and powerful voices pushing misinformation are too often amplified.

Keller talks with us about some ideas on how to get us out of this trap and back to a more distributed internet, where communities and people decide what kind of content moderation we should see—rather than tech billionaires who track us for profit or top-down dictates from governments. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• Why giant platforms do a poor job of moderating content and likely always will
• What competitive compatibility (ComCom) is, and how it’s a vital part of the solution to our content moderation puzzle, but also requires us to solve some issues too
• Why machine learning algorithms won’t be able to figure out who or what a “terrorist” is, and who it’s likely to catch instead
• What is the debate over “amplification” of speech, and is it any different than our debate over speech itself? 
• Why international voices need to be included in discussion about content moderation—and the problems that occur when they’re not
• How we could shift towards “bottom-up” content moderation rather than a concentration of power 

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org.Daphne Keller directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. She’s a former Associate General Counsel at Google, where she worked on groundbreaking litigation and legislation around internet platform liability. You can find her on twitter @daphnehk. Keller’s most recent paper is “Amplification and its Discontents,” which talks about the consequences of governments getting into the business of regulating online speech, and the algorithms that spread them. 

You’ll find legal resources – including links to important cases, books, and briefs discussed in the podcast – as well a full transcript of the audio, at eff.org/pod103.

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